In partnership with
You have twelve unbuilt product ideas sitting in a note somewhere.
You have zero pre-sold ones.
That gap is the whole problem. Not your skill. Not your niche. The order you do things in.
Here's the pattern almost everyone repeats. Build first. Launch second. Hope for payment third. By the time you find out if anyone wants it, you've already spent the two weeks, the software subscription, and the emotional energy convincing yourself it was worth doing. Now you're not just selling a product. You're selling a product while quietly needing it to have been a good idea.
Flip the order and the whole thing gets easier. Sell first. Get paid. Build second, for the person who already said yes.
Sound familiar?
Over 4 million people have had the same lightbulb moment.
Morning Brew is a free daily newsletter that breaks down what's happening in business, finance, and tech — clearly, quickly, and with enough personality to make it the best email in your inbox.
No yelling. No filler. Just the news, finally making sense.
The pre-sell test works like this.
Step one. Write down the thing you already do for free in conversations. The advice you give friends. The thing people ask you about twice a month without paying you a cent.
Step two. Message one person who's asked you about it before. Not a stranger. Someone who already showed interest. Tell them exactly what they'd get and what it costs. Ask for the money before you build anything.
Step three. If they say yes, you have 72 hours to build the smallest version that delivers what you promised. If they say no, you just saved yourself two weeks of building something nobody wanted.
That's the entire mechanism. In poker you don't build a strategy for a hand you haven't been dealt. You wait for the signal, then you act on it. Same principle here. The pre-sell is the signal. Building without it is just betting blind.
This is different from a waitlist. A waitlist collects interest. An email address costs nothing to give and means nothing about whether someone will pay. A pre-sell collects money. Money is the only signal that doesn't lie to you.
Alex Hormozi's value equation says people pay based on the size of the dream outcome relative to the effort and time it takes to get there. You can't calculate that equation honestly until someone's actually paid you to solve it. Everything before that is guessing with extra steps.
If you want a live example of how small a pre-sold offer can be, look at the First Dollar Diagnostic on the HSHS store. Six questions, one answer, one deadline. It didn't get built and then sold. The offer came first.
You don't need a landing page to pre-sell. You don't need a checkout flow, a brand, or a logo. You need one message to one person who already trusts you, and the nerve to ask for money before the thing exists.
Do this today. Pick the one thing people ask you about for free. Message someone who's asked before. Name a price. Ask for payment before you build anything. If they say yes, you have 72 hours. If they say no, you just found out for free.
37 Free Claude Prompts With The AI Report
Subscribe to The AI Report, the free 5-minute daily AI brief for 400,000+ business leaders, and you’ll get 37 Claude prompts free in your welcome email. They’re organised by the 8 situations every manager faces. You get both: the newsletter and the prompts.